CWG: Kalmadi charged with corruption, theft, conspiracy

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Last Updated: Fri, Dec 21, 2012 06:32 hrs

New Delhi: A Delhi court on Friday ordered framing of charges against sacked CWG organising committee Chairman Suresh Kalmadi and others for offences of forgery, cheating and conspiracy in a Games-related graft case.

Special CBI Judge Talwant Singh passed the order on framing of charges against Kalmadi, former OC Secretary General Lalit Bhanot and nine others for illegally awarding a contract to Swiss firm, Swiss Timing Omega, causing huge loss to the exchequer.

The court said "prima facie" charges of cheating, forgery, criminal conspiracy and for offences under the provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act are made out against eight accused persons and three companies.

"Charges under section 120B (criminal conspiracy), 201 (destruction of evidence), 420 (cheating), 467, 468, 471 (relating to forgery), 506 (criminal intimidation) of the IPC and section 13(1)(d) read with section 13(2) (criminal misconduct by public servants) of the PC Act is ordered to be framed against all the accused," the court said.

"Put up for formally framing of charges on January 10 at 10.30 AM," the judge said.

The accused have been charge sheeted by the CBI for "illegally" awarding a contract to install Timing, Scoring and Results (TSR) system for the 2010 CWG to Swiss Timing at an inflated rates causing a loss of over Rs 90 crore to the public exchequer.

During arguments over the charges, Kalmadi's counsel said the facts given in the CBI's charge-sheet were contrary to documents submitted by the agency to the court.

Kalmadi had told the court that he was only doing the work assigned to him as the OC chairman and nothing wrong was done by him during the entire process.

Besides Kalmadi and Bhanot, the other accused in the case are OC's Director General V K Verma, Director General (Procurement) Surjit Lal, Joint Director General (Sports) A S V Prasad and Treasurer M Jayachandran. They are no more associated with the sporting body.

Promoters of two construction companies - P D Arya and A K Madan of Faridabad-based Gem International and A K Reddy of Hyderabad-based AKR Constructions are also accused in the case. Swiss Timing Omega is also an accused in the case.